An excerpt from the first comprehensive collection of essays on a poetry movement that can equal any other in the world.

English poetry, it might safely be surmised, arrived in India from about the eighteenth century onward in the knapsacks, trunks, portmanteaus and bags of traders and adventurers intent on making their fortunes in the East. It then proceeded to establish itself among readers in exile and readers new to the English language with great and astonishing rapidity, fuelled in most part by the newspaper and periodical print culture that had spread through urban and semi-urban settlements in every part of the country.

The first newspaper in India, Hicky’s Bengal Gazette, reserved a section of the pages of its first issue in 1780 for a Poet’s Corner, a demarcated space which would carry one or more poem in each issue for the short period of the paper’s existence, a practice followed by every nineteenth-century newspaper published subsequently. The poem published in the first issue was called The Seasons, and described, expectedly, the English seasons; it took a few months for a long poem with the title A Description of India to make an appearance here.

Does "Indian poetry" exist?

Since then to the present day, poetry written in India in the English language has, of course, changed hands and, indeed, changed nationality – what was once written by Englishmen in India, English poetry, is now Indian poetry (and has been since the nineteenth century), and is currently generally called Indian poetry in English to distinguish it from poetry written by Indians in the classical languages in the past and in the many powerful modern Indian regional languages since the mid-nineteenth century. If ever used in an over-arching sense, any category called “Indian Poetry” is a construct that is still hard to defend; in a 1963 article titled Bengali Gastronomy, the famous Bengali poet and critic Buddhadeva Bose had commented derisively that just as there was no such thing as “Indian food”, there was no such thing as “Indian Literature”, gesturing elliptically at the common understanding that every region in India produced its own variant tradition – of poetry or curry – and needed to be marked accordingly.

So there was Kannada, Punjabi or Gujarati literature (or cuisine), but nothing that could be described as “Indian” curry or “Indian” poetry outside of Indian restaurants and international publishing houses abroad. Besides, in India, Indian writing had never meant, and could never only mean, Indian writing that was done in English; the coloniser’s language was presumed to be a deracinated thing of the elites: unrepresentative, uninviting, and certainly unwanted.

Thirty five years from Bose’s comment, towards the end of the twentieth century in 1998, the pendulum had swung so far in the opposite direction that Salman Rushdie was emboldened to declare, in the introduction to The Vintage Book of Indian Writing 1947-97 that he co-edited with Elizabeth West, that not only was there something called “Indian Writing”, as their title indicated, but that on the evidence of the fifty years under consideration in the volume, it was best represented by writing in English alone.

Such a remark, of course, was always designed to provoke a backlash from the Indian literate classes, which it did with great success; less remarked upon was the fact that Rushdie’s notion of “writing” did not for a moment include poetry in it – irrespective of whether it was of the regional or Anglophone variety. Yet Indian poetry in English arguably has a more distinguished lineage than its counterpart, the novel; intrinsically, it has accomplished and achieved as much, if not more, than the celebrated fiction by well-known names that occupies so much shelf space, media space, and literary chatter nowadays, and it has done its work quietly, passionately, and to extraordinarily high standards through all these years. This book is an attempt to elucidate this fact and make a case for it in the wider world of reading.

A tradition without a history

Indian poetry in English is an indissoluble component of India’s existence in modernity, yet this is a tradition without a proper history, an unclaimed tradition for much of its beleaguered and secret existence. No clear notion of its origins and development exists in the minds of most literate Indians, who have generally been introduced to it through prescribed reading at school, alongside much-anthologised and occasionally syrupy specimens from the English canon, as some of the contributions to this volume will mention.

The first introduction to poetry in the English language for Indians might go back to pre-school childhood for some and linger in memories of books of English nursery rhymes with coloured illustrations (in what can only be described as Eastman colour) of blackbirds coming out of pies, rosy-cheeked boys and girls, fat pink pigs, or grandfather clocks with mice in them, all of which usually existed in middle-class surroundings far removed from the world depicted in the utopian space of the pages themselves. From there to Lochinvar and Daffodils in school, without any clear idea as to what the Scottish Border or the daffodil ever looked like, in common with almost every boy or girl studying English in formerly colonised countries anywhere, was a short hop.

The only concession to hard-earned political independence in these school text books was the inclusion of Derozio’s apparently dreary sonnet, To India, My Native Land (a title ascribed to the sonnet by the anthologist rather than the poet), or some even drearier Sarojini Naidu specimen on Coromandel fishermen or palanquin bearers that continues to be part of school text books today.

Excerpted with the author’s permission from the Introduction, by Rosinka Chaudhuri, to A History of Indian Poetry in English, edited by Rosinka Chaudhuri, Cambridge University Press, 2016.

Adopting three simple habits can help maximise the benefits of existing sanitation infrastructure.

India’s sanitation problem is well documented – the country was recently declared as having the highest number of people living without basic sanitation facilities. Sanitation encompasses all conditions relating to public health - especially sewage disposal and access to clean drinking water. Due to associated losses in productivity caused by sickness, increased healthcare costs and increased mortality, India recorded a loss of 5.2% of its GDP to poor sanitation in 2015. As tremendous as the economic losses are, the on-ground, human consequences of poor sanitation are grim - about one in 10 deaths, according to the World Bank.

Poor sanitation contributes to about 10% of the world’s disease burden and is linked to even those diseases that may not present any correlation at first. For example, while lack of nutrition is a direct cause of anaemia, poor sanitation can contribute to the problem by causing intestinal diseases which prevent people from absorbing nutrition from their food. In fact, a study found a correlation between improved sanitation and reduced prevalence of anaemia in 14 Indian states. Diarrhoeal diseases, the most well-known consequence of poor sanitation, are the third largest cause of child mortality in India. They are also linked to undernutrition and stunting in children - 38% of Indian children exhibit stunted growth. Improved sanitation can also help reduce prevalence of neglected tropical diseases (NTDs). Though not a cause of high mortality rate, NTDs impair physical and cognitive development, contribute to mother and child illness and death and affect overall productivity. NTDs caused by parasitic worms - such as hookworms, whipworms etc. - infect millions every year and spread through open defecation. Improving toilet access and access to clean drinking water can significantly boost disease control programmes for diarrhoea, NTDs and other correlated conditions.

Unfortunately, with about 732 million people who have no access to toilets, India currently accounts for more than half of the world population that defecates in the open. India also accounts for the largest rural population living without access to clean water. Only 16% of India’s rural population is currently served by piped water.

However, there is cause for optimism. In the three years of Swachh Bharat Abhiyan, the country’s sanitation coverage has risen from 39% to 65% and eight states and Union Territories have been declared open defecation free. But lasting change cannot be ensured by the proliferation of sanitation infrastructure alone. Ensuring the usage of toilets is as important as building them, more so due to the cultural preference for open defecation in rural India.

According to the World Bank, hygiene promotion is essential to realise the potential of infrastructure investments in sanitation. Behavioural intervention is most successful when it targets few behaviours with the most potential for impact. An area of public health where behavioural training has made an impact is WASH - water, sanitation and hygiene - a key issue of UN Sustainable Development Goal 6. Compliance to WASH practices has the potential to reduce illness and death, poverty and improve overall socio-economic development. The UN has even marked observance days for each - World Water Day for water (22 March), World Toilet Day for sanitation (19 November) and Global Handwashing Day for hygiene (15 October).

At its simplest, the benefits of WASH can be availed through three simple habits that safeguard against disease - washing hands before eating, drinking clean water and using a clean toilet. Handwashing and use of toilets are some of the most important behavioural interventions that keep diarrhoeal diseases from spreading, while clean drinking water is essential to prevent water-borne diseases and adverse health effects of toxic contaminants. In India, Hindustan Unilever Limited launched the Swachh Aadat Swachh Bharat initiative, a WASH behaviour change programme, to complement the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan. Through its on-ground behaviour change model, SASB seeks to promote the three basic WASH habits to create long-lasting personal hygiene compliance among the populations it serves.

This touching film made as a part of SASB’s awareness campaign shows how lack of knowledge of basic hygiene practices means children miss out on developmental milestones due to preventable diseases.

Play

SASB created the Swachhata curriculum, a textbook to encourage adoption of personal hygiene among school going children. It makes use of conceptual learning to teach primary school students about cleanliness, germs and clean habits in an engaging manner. Swachh Basti is an extensive urban outreach programme for sensitising urban slum residents about WASH habits through demos, skits and etc. in partnership with key local stakeholders such as doctors, anganwadi workers and support groups. In Ghatkopar, Mumbai, HUL built the first-of-its-kind Suvidha Centre - an urban water, hygiene and sanitation community centre. It provides toilets, handwashing and shower facilities, safe drinking water and state-of-the-art laundry operations at an affordable cost to about 1,500 residents of the area.

HUL’s factory workers also act as Swachhata Doots, or messengers of change who teach the three habits of WASH in their own villages. This mobile-led rural behaviour change communication model also provides a volunteering opportunity to those who are busy but wish to make a difference. A toolkit especially designed for this purpose helps volunteers approach, explain and teach people in their immediate vicinity - their drivers, cooks, domestic helps etc. - about the three simple habits for better hygiene. This helps cast the net of awareness wider as regular interaction is conducive to habit formation. To learn more about their volunteering programme, click here. To learn more about the Swachh Aadat Swachh Bharat initiative, click here.

This article was produced by the Scroll marketing team on behalf of Hindustan Unilever and not by the Scroll editorial team.